The Swallowed Saint

By Drew Williamson
Manu Forti Games
OSR
Levels 3-5

When a priest goes missing, the search leads player characters deep into the swamp into the drowned ruins of a forgotten temple to Cwrnus.

This twelve page adventure uses four pages to describe ten rooms in an old sunken temple in the swamp. Decent imagery, decent formatting, decent interactivity … it’s a decent adventure 🙂 But, seriously, an adventure that is not going to be the cornerstone of a game but can serve well as a side-trek or add-on adventure to whats going on in your game. That’s the kind of journeyman effort that I wish we saw more of, a niche that has thousands and thousands of entires and painfully few that do it well.

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: that fucking font man! God dammit! Who told people that using an “interesting” font was a good idea? In this case it’s legible, but its also pushing up against the cognitive burden threshold. I can’t fight the text at the table in order to read it. That should be basic. I understand there’s a spectrum here, but designers need to be err’ing well on the side of easy to read. Your fucking font adds nothing to the fucking vibe. 

Other than that though, I don’t have a lot to bitch about.

Hooks are hooks. One stands out “muck covered dog, pulling on edges of cloaks, whimpering, following the party, urging them back to where he was separated from his master.” Not following up leads to the second hook, where the local clergy, having seen the dog return, put out feelers for murder hobos to go save their vicar, the dogs master. Nice way to circle the hook back around to a more traditional one.

Formatting is OSE style, which you are gonna love or hate. It’s done pretty well here, with a decent understanding of what should be bolding and what words to follow up with. So Stone Blocks (walls, ceiling 8’, floor) Wet (slick with algae) Bas-relief (ivy-wreathed face on west wall above wood chest) if about how I would say something like “Large stone blocks, wet with algae make up the room with a stone face wreathed in ivy on the west wall. There’s a chest underneath it.” Meh. I like it. It’s the difference between a good implementation of the OSE descriptive style ad a bad one. This designer generally gets it right, working the descriptions in such a way, as I noted in my expansion, that the OSE keywords act as a shorthand for the DM to expand upon, something the DM is going to do anyway. Done well the OSE style is fine. But, you have to know what you’re doing and this designer does. 

What does stand out to me is the design. Placing a pendant found in one location in a sarcophagus indent allows you to rotate it 180 degrees, causing the bottom of it to fall out, revealing a flooded passage below. An eerie yellow-green glow comes up from it. Inside is fully submerged (10’ ceiling, 9’ standing water) a kind of hallway, marsh lights floating on top, and, around a corner a burial urn. FULL OF FUCKING L000000t! That’s the way you put in a major treasure. A couple of steps but nothing absurd, a false tomb, some danger, some eerie. I’m down. It’s a major treasure. It’s not out in the open, you have to jump through a couple of hoops and be observant. It’s eerie, there’s an environmental factor. Nothing is really telegraphed through murals or journals. It’s got some terrain depth to it, under the normal dungeon area.  In another area a rotting drain cover can break which might end up sucking you down it, getting pulled underwater by the natural vacuum. And we’ve got egg covered corpses, ready to burst, and font and alters ready to be reconsecrated and/or be activated. It’s really some decent amount of things to be fucked with and they fit in naturally and are not forced. It’s good job. 

I’m back to bitching a bit. The egg corpses thing. That, and some burned skeletons on the walls. Both are clearly elements of horror. Yet the theming of these and horror elements don’t come through very strongly. I think you can see where the designer wants to go with them, but they just are not supported enough, through the text, to really bring them out to the forefront. They feel more like window dressing. 

This is a small twelve page adventure with about ten rooms. It’s not flashy, but hits its marks pretty solidly. I wish there was just a bit more in the way of the burned bodies/eggs, but, also, it’s got some nice notes on consequences after the adventure. Maybe not full on Broodmother/LotFP, but also non-trivial and shows the consequences of the parties actions. Solid adventure for a random hex. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. I has sad face.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/531004/the-swallowed-saint?1892600